


i've got this music in my mind (saying it's gonna be all right)

by togethertheyfightcrime



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Catholic Steve Rogers, Cheesy As Shit, Developing James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Developing Relationship, Hannukah, Irish Steve Rogers, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Latkes, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Canon, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Steve's checkered apron, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, apparently 'cheesy as shit' is an actual tag whaddya know, canon is just something other people made up, movie nights with Avengers and friends, obligatory Irish jokes, pizza shield!, the only civil war in this fic is the one that ended in 1895, what the fuck even is the MCU timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 22:13:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13374126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togethertheyfightcrime/pseuds/togethertheyfightcrime
Summary: Set in the headcanoned world everyone imagined post-CATWS, a small fic wherein Bucky comes home to Steve and they are both HAPPY and ADORABLY IN LOVE and all the Avengers are each others' FRIENDS and NO ONE is sad and there are MOVIE NIGHTS and WISECRACKING and all kinds of DELIGHTFUL INTERPERSONAL HIJINKS.





	i've got this music in my mind (saying it's gonna be all right)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this probably two years ago inspired more by fandom's version of MCU, where everyone is friends and feels okay and lives in New York and comes to Movie Night at Avengers Tower. Not canon compliant for anything past Winter Soldier because basically every Avengers film after Winter Soldier is weird and contrived and depressing with the sole, glorious exception of Thor: Ragnarok. Finishing and posting it now is my way of hearkening back to the good ol' days of MCU when everyone was telling character-driven stories about how the Avengers interacted with one another and the entertaining interpersonal antics they got up to. Personally, I kind of prefer the Avengers of fic to the Avengers of film lately – if only because fanfiction writers maintain _way_ more coherent timelines than the MCU people do. Is time even real in the Marvel universe? Literally no one knows.
> 
> Edited 3/20/18 because I'm an idiot who forgot the Statue of Liberty is on a separate island even though I've literally seen it from across the water in my own real life.

**2015**

 

“Hey, Stevie,” Bucky says one morning. “You wanna hear an awful joke?”

 

“Sure.” Steve shuffles the pan over the stovetop. Eggs sizzle on the pan’s face; to his left, the coffeemaker bubbles as it brews. Their apartment smells like good things, things a part of Steve’s still hardly believes he has the money for. Take the kid out of the Depression, Natasha says. 

 

Bucky’s perched on the kitchen counter with his hair falling out of a bun. He’s got one foot on a stool and the other foot dangling. Both bare – Buck’s always managed to lose his socks, even before. 

 

“Just gotta say, I didn’t write this one myself.” Bucky inhales the coffee smell, then: “How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?”

 

Steve turns from the stove, pan in hand, and eyebrows Bucky. “To _kill_ an Irishman?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“So – what, we’re throwing potatoes? Potato cannons? Stark says kids make those.”

 

Shaking his head so that the bun unravels entirely, Bucky puffs a breath. “Funny to think – kids got so much to eat here they fighting _with_ food and not _over_ it.”

 

“Better that way,” decides Steve. He nudges Bucky’s metal arm with the pan and Bucky hops from the counter obligingly, giving Steve space to scrape the eggs onto their plates. Bucky reaches over Steve’s shoulder to grab salt, and pepper, and basil, and Steve doesn’t know what else, because the novelty of _having money to live by_ – and then some – probably won’t ever wear off.

 

Neither will the novelty of having a home together again – with a kitchen so cramped that no matter where Steve goes he’s leaning against or bumping into Bucky somehow. Like now, how their sides are pressed together so that Steve has to wriggle past Bucky to get the pan in the sink. There’s jostling and bumped elbows and it’s perfect.

 

Bucky goes to town, decorating his egg with a melange of grey and white and green. So Steve waits until Bucky’s chewing a huge mouthful to ask,“So what’s the joke?”

 

“Mmgh?”

 

“The Irishman,” Steve says. “The one we’re killing with potatoes. This is gonna be an immigration thing, huh?”

 

He watches Bucky’s throat work to swallow the egg. “None.”

 

“What?”

 

“That’s the answer, punk.” Bucky grins, flashing those teeth all bright and clean – a real prettier smile from what Steve’s used to seeing on Bucky, but he’s glad. No rations, no polio, enough money, clean teeth. Future’s not so bad, considering. “How many potatoes it takes to kill an Irishman. None.”

 

It takes Steve a blink, and another, and then he gets it _._ He loosens the knot of his apron real casually, rolls it up in one hand, and lobs it at Bucky. Bucky laughs, ducks, even though his metal arm could’ve snatched the checkered fabric out of the air faster than Steve could toss it.

 

“That’s awful,” says Steve, “ _awful,_ Buck,” even though he’s grinning so hard his cheeks ache, and Bucky’s laughing, really laughing in big heaves of breath and tumulting sound. It’s the kind of thing that, back then, back before, Steve would have killed to see every morning. (In some unimagined world where there was nothing to fear every time they stood too close.)

 

Now – it’s taken long enough for them to get _here_ , grinning at each other like the dumb punks they are over fresh eggs and the slant of morning sunlight, with stupid jokes and Brooklyn traffic sounding in their shared air, that Steve just counts himself the luckiest guy around to have this at all. 

 

 

**1918 // 2016**

 

Earliest thing Steve can remember of his da – and he only does because there’s nothing else of his father to recall – is a fuzzy smiling face who lifts Steve, sets him on his shoulder so Steve can see the green lady standing over the water, says _she there’s who we saw when we came here, a_ _stóirín_. _Can you see her?_

 

Steve can remember, he thinks, how his fingers got tangled in his da’s hair. A blurry glimpse of a someone green, reaching up – he could see. 

 

Now, if he and Bucky go far enough in their morning run, and sometimes they do, she’s still there, across the water. She doesn’t often mean what she once did to people, except to the ones who are as old as Steve and Bucky, but that’s what memory is for. Someday, when there’s not so many tourists to gape at the pair of them (who are they kidding, but they can hope), Steve and Bucky’ll go back to Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty and they’ll take the steps to the top, like they couldn’t have when they were young. (Because before, Steve could never have made it, and Bucky, he’d never leave Steve behind.)

 

Someday they’ll stroll through Times Square, too, just like any pair of New Yorkers. For now – it’s a lot of lights, and sounds, and chaos, and _people_ pressed against them moving and jostling and elbowing all around, coming in and out of stores and subways and Starbucks, running through traffic and taking pictures and talking at and over and past each other – Bucky’s not quite ready for it, he says, and that’s just fine. Steve hasn’t been back there since his first visit, anyway. 

 

The name’s no help either –  _Times_ Square. The passing of, the loss of. The kind of dumb shit Steve used to think up in the middle of the night and lose sleep over.

 

Now, well. He’s not so cheesy as to say it aloud, but he’s got better reasons to lose sleep. Mostly involving Bucky.

 

 

**2015**

 

“Hey, I read up on some stuff,” says Bucky, which means he’s either been cheek-deep in a book or hunched over their laptop the whole time Steve was gone. “Turns out you don’t have to go to college to go to college anymore.”

 

Must have been the internet, then. (At least Bucky’s not fixing Wikipedia articles today; Steve’s gotten one too many terse emails from the Wikimedia Foundation lately. He’s on a first-name basis with Lila Tretikov.) 

 

Steve pauses with his jacket in one hand and his shield in another. Then he hangs the jacket up on the hook by the door. “Run that one by me again, Buck.”

 

Bucky kind of lopes over the back of the couch and nabs the shield from Steve’s hands. “You can do college from home, did you know that? Take classes on the computer. From nearly any place you like.”

 

He spins the shield round a metal finger like it’s pizza dough, which, to be fair, it’s done its time as a platter for late-night pizza deliveries when they’re feeling too lazy to wash the dishes, so.

 

The thing is – Steve’s always had to be good at is figuring out what people _aren’t_ saying. He could hear the hidden words from the folks who wouldn’t hire him (scrawny sickly Steve, with his Irish ma and no father in sight), from the priests Steve used to confess to (the silence in the confessional as they waited for Steve to confess what he couldn’t even to himself), from Bucky’s kid sister making kissing faces at the pair of them when Bucky’s ma had her back turned (Rebecca was never much for subtlety). 

 

Point is – it’s easy, with Bucky who he knows inside out and backwards, to hear his unspoken words. Steve crosses his arms and leans on the wall, casual as anything. “I’ve heard about that. Figured maybe I’d sign up for a class or two, someday if there’s not so many people trying to take over the world.”

 

Bucky puffs a near laugh as he spins the shield back to Steve. “Well, I ain’t got a job. Might as well get myself educated.”

 

_You could have a job_ , Steve almost says, _if you wanted,_ but holds his tongue. He knows what Bucky’s afraid of – hell, Steve’s afraid of it too. Bucky’d been tortured and used for decades. Steve wouldn’t –  _couldn’t_ ask Bucky to risk that again. 

 

“What do you want to learn?”

 

Bucky shrugs. “Anything. Something – useful, you know? Something _good_. For when I, when I start – going outside. More often.”

 

The thing was, Bucky didn’t really go outside alone. When he wasn’t hanging around Steve, he was on a walk with Sam in the wide, green space of Central Park. Or on a vaguely covert (read: museum trips) outing with Nat and sniping contentedly with her in a muddle of English and Russian (Bucky had started bugging Steve about teaching him some Latin to get one up on Nat, but beyond Our Father and Hail Mary, Steve was pretty much lost). Sometimes Bucky tagged along to one of Stark’s Avengers-and-co parties in the new tower. And there were, of course, their horrifically awkward debriefings, with a very cunningly disguised Fury ambushing them at very inopportune times to check that neither of his defrosted vets had killed themselves/each other/New York. 

 

The root of it was the same as the thing with the Avengers: Bucky didn’t trust himself beyond where the people he trusted could stop him. 

 

So Bucky not wanting to take classes outside, by himself, Steve got that. Bucky wanting to take classes, Steve got; Buck had always been top of the class, back in school. Bucky was sharp as a whip; with all the school Steve missed being sick, it was only with the long patient hours Bucky spent catching Steve up that let Steve pass at all. 

 

Steve wasn’t exactly surprised that Bucky was cautiously considering allowing himself to join the world – but he was happy, because it was a step. A big one – one that Steve hadn’t managed to make, not really, until after he saw his new world almost get destroyed. 

 

Steve beamed. “That’s great, Buck. That’s really great.”

 

“Think so?” There was a hopeful sort of gleam in Bucky’s eye. He stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets, a new habit he’d picked up to keep his nervous fingers from tapping and fiddling. (There were always a few loose seams on the left pockets of Bucky’s pants that Steve noticed when he ran their clothes through the complicated washing machine Stark gave them.) Somehow Bucky seemed nearer eighteen than thirty, rocking on his heels and looking _up_ at Steve, which Steve still wasn’t used to.

 

Steve shifts off the wall and grins. “Course I do, Bucky,” he tells him.

 

 

**movie night – December 2015**

 

When Bucky first moved in (and mostly stopped trying to attack things), someone – probably Sam – suggested that the pair of them get a pet. 

 

“Can’t. Stevie’s got allergies,” Bucky had said, before blinking up at Steve in mild surprise – back then, things were still a little mixed up in his head (and Steve’s too, if he’s honest). Nowadays they’re both at the peak of human physicality and are pretty much sane (according to Bruce, though the good doctor muttered that he might not be the best judge of that kind of thing). So for the first time, a pet is a possibility.

 

It becomes a _thing_ in their group of – well, Steve calls them friends. Bucky calls them crazier than he is and what the hell’d they drag you into this time, Steven Rogers. Stark calls them a horde of squatters leeching off his goodwill, even though it’s only Bruce who lives in the Tower full-time, and Tony’s the one who built everybody a damn floor in his building anyhow. Point: Avengers and company (an extended set, now that Sam’s sort of in the club and Maria Hill is running the initiative with terrifying competence) have decided it’s their mission to find the _best pet ever_ for their favorite nonagenarians. 

 

“You met my dog, right?” Clint asks, for maybe the dozenth time. From the corner of his eye, Steve can see Bucky groan and sink into the sofa. 

 

It was the ill-fated night when the Avengers decided to convene and watch _Interstellar_. (A bad idea for _so many reasons_ – so many that Natasha made a list and hung it in Stark’s media room:

  * the stupidity of subjecting two men who’d lost everyone they loved in the past to a tearjerker about temporal relativity, especially when said two men know that emotions give Tony hives
  * expecting Clint to be serious while watching a Spielberg film, especially a Spielberg film depicting a Midwestern farmer drinking beer on his porch and then _going to space_
  * expecting Natasha not to get pissed off by _yet another_ America-centric drama film where the world is ending and literally _no other country_ on the _entire planet_ does anything about it, what the fuck
  * watching a movie that tries to use science while Tony and/or Bruce are in the room (but especially, _especially_ Bruce)
  * denying Bruce access to his phone but forgetting about his computer where he frequently Skypes with Dr Foster, and thus subjecting the world’s mightiest heroes to hours of video-chatting physicists shrieking things like ‘ _But event horizons’_ and ‘ _Why can’t anyone understand_ ’)



 

At that moment, however, their motley crew was happily bickering over what movie to see and whose turn it was to pick, _really_ , and no, Tony, it’s _not yours._

 

(It would also be the night Bruce was sworn in as the eternal keeper of the movie-selecting roster, so help us God – “also, um, so help us vague spiritual forces of meditation,” Clint would hastily and awkwardly add, “or, like, Darwin if you’re Tony, and – Steve, would you go for Mary? Does God pretty much cover it? God et al. assorted saints,” he managed, before Natasha threw a pillow at him.)

 

“Yes, Clint,” replies Steve, patiently, because Clint’s a swell guy who really is trying to help. “We’ve met your dog. Several times. He tried to eat the fingers off Bucky’s left hand, remember? Nearly broke a tooth?”

 

Seeing an Avenger try not to snort while laughing at the memory of an assassin’s antics is…actually something that happens to Steve a lot, considering how many assassins he hangs out with. Clint pretends to wipe an eye. “Still wish I’d gotten a picture. I need that kinda thing on my Instagram. It’s not fair that Thor’s got more followers than me.”

 

“You post selfies with your arrows and your dog and you always forget to crosspost,” Natasha reminds him. “Thor has eleven social media accounts with pictures of _alien planets_ and everyone’s favorite astrophysicist.”

 

“Oh, the guy from Cosmos, right?” says Bucky, just to be a punk.

 

Steve runs a hand over his chin. “No, that’s Dr Foster’s friend Neil.”

 

“It’s so weird,” says Tony, emerging for the first time from behind the haze of his smartphone’s light, “that you two watch Cosmos. Like, you can process broad scientific concepts. They barely had _cars_ when you were kids.”

 

“Nope,” says Steve, . “Horse and buggy.”

 

“Wheel got invented in our parents’ day,” adds Bucky.

 

“You remember your ma talkin’ about the fuss people made over sliced bread?”

 

“God, I hate you both,” Tony grumbles. “History books should’ve warned us that you’re both complete assholes.”

 

“History,” announces Bucky, “says Steve was a good kid who never drove his ma up the wall coming home with a busted face after picking a fight with some eight guys twice his weight for talking during a movie.”

 

“Bucky!”

 

How _that_ makes Clint think of Steven Spielberg, none can fathom, but: “ _Ooh_ ,” says Clint, with a funny glint in his eye, “you know what we _could_ watch?”

 

It’s the last time Clint gets choose a movie.

 

 

**Hanukkah – 1933**

 

The Barnes family used to invite Steve over for a few of the nights of Hanukkah. Bucky would always elbow Steve in the ribs (then hide a wince when his elbow struck all those skin-straining bones), say a fella can’t help if he’s born Catholic, come on over and help my old lady with the latkes anyhow. 

 

“You’re Irish, you know potatoes,” Bucky insisted, with a big old innocent face. 

 

“Lay off, Buck, you just wanna get out of cooking,” said Steve, who had the hard job of pretending not to notice how the Barneses fed him up whenever they had an excuse.

 

Bucky grabbed at Steve’s bony wrists, held Steve’s hands up in the air between them. “You know how long it took me to get the smell’ve onion off my hands last year? I bet I can still catch a whiff, what d’you–” He pushed the fingers of his right hand under Steve’s nose, making the backs of his fingers skim Steve’s chin, brush Steve’s dry lips. 

 

“I dunno,” said Steve, trying not to swallow. “So, what, I gotta smell like onion now?”

 

“Better you than me, right? Come on, Stevie, I already told Becca you’re gonna come,” Bucky said, big-eyed. There’s a _thump_ and a scritching of claws in the apartment wall, from one of the rat family that generations of determined residents couldn’t expel. Casually, Bucky thumps a fist on the wall and sends the rat skittering into the ceiling. “She got some raisins to spin the dreidel for. Maybe you’ll get _gimel_ for once, huh?”

 

“I always get _shin_ ,” muttered Steve. He tugs his wrist out of Bucky’s hand before shrugging into his patched coat.

 

Bucky said, “Luck of the Irish,” before swinging an arm around Steve’s skinny shoulders and steering him out of the door. 

 

 

**movie night – February 2016**

 

Stark calls for another movie night in the penthouse of Avengers Tower. Movie nights have come to mean that there’s something or other Tony’s procrastinating, with ‘team bonding’ as his excuse. Neither Steve nor Bucky mind; it’s kinda nice to be around the few people who have almost-as-weird life experiences when they’re _not_ all facing the end of the world.

 

It’s been Bruce keeping tabs on ‘who gets to pick the movie this time, no, Tony, not you’ for months now, because nobody wants to argue with Bruce. (It’s because Bruce is a genuinely decent man and has this nice Zen thing going, this sort of catalyst for calm that helps keep arguments from happening. It’s not because he also has far-reaching anger issues that occasionally manifest and smash things. Not at all.) He calls up Steve and Bucky.

 

“If either of you pick _National Treasure_ ,” warns Tony, shaking a finger at them from his perch on the back of the sofa (not on the seat, not on the cushions, but on the _back_ , because Tony), “I will change both your birth certificates and make you Canadian, so help me God.”

 

Bucky deadpans, “There’s nothing wrong with Canada,” and drapes an arm around Steve’s shoulders. It’s stupidly distracting, given that Steve’s all but grown up with one of Bucky’s arms around him.

 

“Yeah, I like Canadians,” says Clint. “I’m definitely saying that because I mean it, not because some of them are scary bearded men with claws.”

 

Steve wouldn’t know what to make of that statement even _if_ it hadn’t come from a man in dog hair-covered jeans crouched atop a refrigerator. (Steve doesn’t know why Clint’s on the fridge, and isn’t planning to ask. They’ve got some weird coping mechanisms, they Avengers.)

 

“So that’s nobody for _Independence Day_ , I guess,” Steve says, feeling triumph when Tony groans in pain and collapses off the sofa back into a pile of cushions. Also, halfway into Bruce’s lap, which doesn’t seem to be bothering Bruce that much. Again: Steve isn’t asking.

 

“Patriotic nonagenarians are asshats,” comes a muffled moan from the man that really, everyone swears, is actually a genius. 

 

“That’s not a word,” Clint yells from the refrigerator. 

 

“Don’t judge me,” Tony yells back from the sofa cushion on Bruce’s thigh. “Look at your life choices, you’re on a refrigerator.”

 

“Look at your _face._ You’re the one who built us all floors in your house.”

 

“It’s a _skyscraper_ , you _dick_ ,” Tony exclaims, actually lifting his head up for a second, before flopping back down with such vigor he dislodges Bruce’s glasses. “I hate my life, what did I do to deserve this.”

 

“Quick while they’re distracted,” Bucky mock-whispers to Natasha, “put on _Saving Private Ryan_. I’m gonna teach these punks how to _really_ build a sticky bomb.”

 

Tony’s response is in audible capslock because that’s a thing Tony can do. “IF THAT IS AN INNUENDO, I SWEAR TO _GOD_ , BARNES–”

 

Bucky and Steve are too busy asphyxiating from laughter to confirm or deny. Everyone but Tony follows suit. 

 

Bruce is the first one to get ahold of himself and manage, “Well – you know – what goes around…"

 

“Will you _stop_ with the _zen_ thing, I’m an _atheist_ , dammit,” Tony tells the sofa cushion.

 

“Can you damn things when you’re an atheist?” mutters Bucky. Tony looks up again to glare at Bucky, whose face immediately morphs into the face of a long-lashed angel with a lumpy French braid. It’s the innocent _aw shucks_ face that’s gotten Steve and Bucky out of more trouble than Steve can remember. (The braid, on the other hand, is a relic of Bucky’s old hairstyling ability from his days of shuffling sisters to school: Bucky’s trying to relearn some of his hair tricks to impress Becca’s little great-grandkids.)

 

Tony manages to work one hand out of the cushions to flip off the room in general. Bucky snorts. 

 

There’s a shifting from Nat’s corner, where she has a loveseat to herself and the cat that she occasionally brings to movie nights just to watch Stark squirm uncomfortably and complain about fur on his upholstery. (The cat is probably her pet, Steve decides, or at least hopes.) She shuts the latest of the ridiculously thick untranslated novels she reads in her spare time and says, “I’ve got a suggestion.”

 

“Ew,” says Bucky. “Nobody wants to watch your weird foreign-language indie films.”

 

“We’re literally all at _least_ bilingual,” Natasha says. “¿ _Estoy en lo cierto? Ili ya prav?_ Also: closed-captions! A marvel of the modern age.”

 

“I second that,” yells Clint.

 

Bruce listens for a second as Tony makes muffled complaints into a cushion, then translates aloud: “This isn’t a book club, we’re not here to read a movie, we’re here to watch a movie and regret how many snacks we eat.”

 

“Who’s regretting?” Steve asks. He sidles an arm into Bucky’s lap, steals a handful of those mini brownies Clint bakes from it, and shoves them into his mouth while ducking a swat. “We’ll work ’em off saving the world.”

 

“Says the man with a healing factor,” adds Bruce, though Steve’s not sure if it’s a Tony translation or just Bruce.

 

In the meantime, Natasha has logged into Tony’s Netflix account from her phone (Tony’s Netflix queue, which she scrolls idly through just so the rest of the team can marvel at it too, is a thing of wonder and many clues to the man’s psyche –  _The X Files,_ for instance, is right beside _Lilo and Stitch_ , which is above _Good Will Hunting_ , a superhero documentary, one of Steve’s stupid old propaganda flicks, and _The Clone Wars_ ) and pulled up a Brazilian film with biking teenagers on the cover. She turns on the English subtitles and settles back in the loveseat. The cat immediately curls like an ouroboros on her lap. 

 

Bruce occasionally offers his own translations of the Portuguese when he thinks the closed-captioning is lacking. Tasha pets the cat, which purrs louder than Tony whines about how the subtitles take too long to read and he’s missing the actual movie. 

 

“You read eight months’ worth of Selvig’s thermonuclear astrophysical data overnight,” Bruce reminds Tony. “You’re not even a physicist, that’s my job, and it took me a couple days to process.”

 

“You’re a _doctor_ , that’s your job,” mumbles Tony, curled up with a couch cushion and his head balanced precariously on Bruce’s left knee. 

 

“I’m a guy with a doctor _ate._ ”

 

“But you save small villages and like, give birth to babies and stuff.”

 

“I’ve never given birth to anything, Tony, I don’t have a uterus.”

 

“I _swear_ ,” says Natasha, managing to direct a scowl their way without taking her eyes off the screen, “I am going to _find_ a small village and destroy it if you two don’t _shut up_.”

 

Bucky kind of nudges Steve’s side and gestures to Clint, who’s spent this whole time watching the screen fixedly in apparent blissful ignorance of anything but the popcorn. He’s turned his hearing aids down, Steve realizes.

 

“Lucky guy,” Bucky whispers in Steve’s ear. The words are smile-tinted and the warm breath makes the small hairs on Steve’s skin quiver. Steve shivers a little and lets himself lean just a bit further into Bucky’s side. It’s chilly in the penthouse, probably. He ignores the smirk on Natasha’s face as she languidly strokes the cat’s spine. 

 

The movie ends up detailing the romance between Leo and another kid, Gabriel. It’s all so adorable that Steve’s stomach feels full of champagne bubbles. He does not, does not look at Bucky’s silhouette beside him, all draped with light from the television screen and softened by the shadows of the dim room. A wide window to a balcony lets in the orange-and-yellow display of New York City’s nightly wakefulness, and the colors eke around the edges of Bucky’s face. Tendrils of hair have slipped from his French braid. He’s so beautiful that Steve’s throat hurts. 

 

In the chorus of _aww_ s resounding at the movie’s end, Steve spares a split second to glare in Natasha’s direction. _First my apron,_ he mouths, _now this_. _Traitor_. 

 

Tasha stops petting the cat to frame a heart in the air with her hands. The cat and Steve both grumble in complain. Bucky grins at the scrolling credits.

 

 

**Summer 2016**

 

“Anybody ever check those dumped SHIELD files for Fury’s birth date?” Tony asks out of the blue. They’re doing a late-morning not-brunch meal (Tony refuses to hear the word “brunch” within his tower, because brunch is for “boring suburbians who are too lazy to get up early for breakfast”). Everyone except Bruce (who likes his mornings peaceful) and Thor (who likes his mornings Asgardian, or with Dr Foster, or both) has shown up: the athletic among them have just returned from their post-workout showers, and the Tonys among them just come in for their sixth round of coffee to be surprised by the fact that it’s late morning.  


“Somehow,” says Steve, “that didn’t cross my mind. The insidious evil of HYDRA was a little distracting.”

 

“Okay, but get this: Nicholas J. Fury’s date of birth is listed as the twenty-first of December, _1951_. He is _sixty-four years old_.”

 

Bucky drops a mug. “Bull _shit_.”

 

“That’s what it says!”

 

“That’s pretty old,” admits Bucky. He prods the mug shards towards the trashcan with his toes and then forgets about them in pursuit of a new mug of coffee. 

 

“Funny, coming from you.”

 

“You know I’m not actually ninety,” Bucky says from behind the coffeepot. “I mean, I’m not exactly sure how old I am, but it’s sure as hell not ninety.”

 

Steve makes a loud show of picking up the pieces of mug and throwing them away, which Bucky ignores, save for a smirk. Nat, to show how uninterested she was in their discourse, loudly flips a page of her newspaper. A pained sound writhes from Tony’s throat. “I can’t believe you read that monstrosity. Didn’t they have wifi in Soviet Russia? Trees _died_ to make your newspaper.”

 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Natasha, “Tony I-will-digitize-toilet-paper Stark, am I offending your environmental sensitivity? When was the last time you communed with nature?”

 

“Remember that time my house got blown up and none of you assholes texted to see if I wanted help saving the president? Well, I crashed in Kentucky and had to haul my suit past some trees.”

 

“I thought you crashed in Tennessee,” Steve says. 

 

“Kentucky, Tennessee. What’s the difference?”

 

“The difference is that they’re not the same place, Tony.”

 

“ _Really_ , Steve? Are they? I bet you couldn’t tell ‘em apart in a lineup.”

 

Bucky steals a page from Nat’s newspaper and dodges her kick. “You can’t arrest a state, Stark.”

 

“Uh, hello,” Tony says, “civil war? Isn’t that kind of what happened?”

 

“I really worry about your education sometimes,” Natasha tells him. “I mean, you can synthesize an element for a perpetual energy source in your basement with blueprints from the last century, but you thought the capital of Spain was Portugal.”

 

“God, you need to let that one go.” Tony rolls his eyes. “I get it, okay, the capital of Spain is Milan, what more do you _want_ from me?”

 

“Remember when we told Tony there was a country called Georgia?” Bucky asks Steve.

 

Steve laughs. “And he was all, ‘what kinda bullshit do you fogies think I’ll fall for?’”

 

“I will punch you both at the same time,” says Tony. “One-handed. I swear to God.”

 

Steve mock-trembles. Bucky bares his teeth at Tony and pretends to growl behind his mess of hair.

 

“Starks are friends, not food.” The newspaper arcs up to cover Nat’s face in case of a food fight.

 

But Bucky breaks into a grin instead. “Hey, we saw that one,” he exclaims, and Steve smiles fondly in recollection of his own triumphant pop-culture references. “It’s got the lady as a fish who can’t remember things, you know, Ellen whose wife’s got a weird name?”

 

“Ellen _DeGeneres_?” Tony says, hoarse with horror at Bucky’s lack of cultural integrity. 

 

“Uh,” says Clint from a ceiling vent. “You mean Portia de Rossi? That’s not a weird name.”

 

“Says the sniper in the ceiling,” Natasha mutters. 

 

“Hey, that sounds like an action movie or something. ‘The name’s _Barton_ ,’” intones Clint, “‘ _Clint_ Barton.’”

 

“That does not sound like an action movie, what the hell kind of action movies do you watch?” Looking disgusted, Tony buried his face in his coffee mug. 

 

“Besides,” Clint adds as he shoves the vent cover aside and drops, neat as a cat, to the kitchen floor, “a dude with a name like _James Buchanan Barnes_ doesn’t get to judge a name like Portia de Rossi.”

 

Bucky smirks. “Sure thing, _Clinton_.” His boots are on the table and he’s leaning back on two chair legs. 

 

Clint aims a kick at one of the chair legs, and Bucky happily swats the other man’s foot away. “At least my name isn’t a president,” Clint mutters.

 

“Because there was never a president with the name Clinton, obviously,” says Natasha. “Who’s literally still alive today and relevant to our culture.”

 

Clint is undeterred in his mockery. “Besides, Barnes, don’t you have a sister called Rebecca – as in _Becky_? Becky and Bucky, the hell were they smoking in your day?”

 

“The Prohibition really did a number on folks,” Steve tells him.

 

“Besides,” says Bucky, “we called her Becca. And I was supposed to be Jimmy, if you can believe it.”

 

Tony emerges from the coffee mug. “Jimmy Barnes,” he enunciates. “The Winter Soldier. Ghost story of the Soviets, terror of spies the world over. _Jimmy_. I’m going to fucking cry.”

 

“Or just Jim,” Natasha offers. “Jim the Spy.” She’s awkwardly folding her newspaper into some crumpled sort of origami shape. One of Steve’s favorite things about Nat is that she’s really, really bad at anything resembling a non-lethal personal activity (doodling, for example, or wearing comfortable but combat-unfriendly socks) – but she tries like hell to do it anyway, because she’s determined to actually live the life she’s won back for herself. 

 

It reminds him a lot of Bucky, too. Bucky, who’s laughing so hard now that his chair has nearly toppled, who scrambles to his feet and has to lean against the wall because his chest is heaving so hard. Bucky, laughing at his name and his past like they’re not shadows that haunt him and memories that pull him into nightmares – and maybe, Steve thinks, they won’t always have to be. Not when there are things like this: laughter, and late-morning not-brunch, and the possibility that Fury is _sixty-four years old_. 

 

Maybe they’ll be all right. 


End file.
